Tuesday, January 14, 2014

A mom for all occasions

For a
young child, his (includes
her) mother is his world.
As long as she is there he has nothing to worry because she looks
after his well being, his welfare. She scolds him to correct his bad
habits. She would see that he does not over eat or over sleep. She
would give him medicine if he falls sick. She shares his happy
moments and still warns him not to get over carried. And the best
part of it all is that she would protect him to the best possible
extent from any calamity that may befall on him.

This
overwhelming importance of our mothers in our lives comes to the fore
rather painfully, when during course of our life we invariably loose
her. Only after she is gone, we realise her importance. We then
start missing her advice, care for us and even nagging. I have read
somewhere(can not vouch for it) that in Chinese language, the word
that means love, has only one meaning. It is the love between a
mother and her child. How true!

However
for all those unfortunate souls like me, for whom a mother remains
only a past and distant memory, a partial solace is on the way, in
form of a robotic machine, which is also called as Mother. In the
recently held 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, USA, a
company called as Sen.se has introduced a robotic machine that seeks
to replicate the sorts of things our mother used to needle us about:
getting exercise, eating more slowly or brushing our teeth.

Sen
se.'s mother however does not look like our mother at all. She looks
more like EVE ( Extraterestrial Vegetation Evcaluator), the girl
friend of Wall-E, a robot hero of 2008 Disney-Pixar animation film.
She even looks like the Russian Matryoshka Dolls that physically fit
into each other. She has rather creepy glowing eyes and white colour,
which ghosts are supposed to have. She may look like a ghost, but she
has kindness in her heart that truly matches our mothers.

So,
what can this mother do? And how? In the first place each of the
mother robots has a number of small tracking devices called cookies
that are connected to her. Each of the cookies have special sensors
fitted that can sense things like motion and temperature. These
cookies can be put on things as well as people so that they can
gather data. For examples, a cookie on your body can gather data
about how much you walk. Or a cookie on your coffee machine will
track how many cups of coffee you drink every day. A cookie on your
front door will track, whenever it is opened. A cookie on your
toothbrush can see how often and how long you brush. Cookies can
monitor all your activities silently and harmlessly.

But
what happens afterwords? Whenever the cookies get a chance to be
closer to the Mother unit, they complain about your behaviour by
wirelessly sending back their data on the Internet. This means that
the Mother knows everything that you have done and are not supposed
to do for healthy lifestyle. Mother can look into all the issues
raised by cookies or decide to concentrate only on topics that need
immediate attention. If a cookie detects a change from usual
behaviour and complains to the mother, she would send an alert on
your home that something important needs immediate attention.

Mother's
manufacturer, Rafi Haladjian says that this data would give the user,
peace of mind by answering questions like “Am I drinking enough
water?” or, “Did somebody open my secret drawer?” A new trend
called the “Internet of Things” is emerging these days meant for
the future, where parts of your body, home and life would be
connected to the Internet to have a general alert system. Having
separate devices for all these things is too expensive, and too
cumbersome because they can’t talk to each other. Mother replaces
all that with a simple concept where all sensor units can talk to the
central unit. The manufacturers of mother feel that It’s kind of
like a mobile device that can run an ever-changing array of apps.
They thought of the name “Mother” because it can do all sort of
things. This mother is not just a nurse, a gardener or a cop, in
fact, she is everything at the same time.